"I didn't want to—" Tav stopped.
"Worry me," Alistair said. "Yes. I see." He held his gaze. "We're both terrible at this."
"We're both trained for contexts where information was a resource to manage rather than to share,"
Tav said.
"Yes." He watched the table. "Same training, different houses."
"Yes."
They sat with the parallel failings.
"The surveillance vehicle," Alistair said.
"It's been there three days. Fixed position, consistent crew rotation, no visible connection to Cain's network architecture." "Someone who knew about the placement before Ablation did."
"Or who knows about the placement because they built it," Alistair said.
Tav studied him.
"Phase Two," Alistair said quietly. "Whatever comes next."
The kitchen was quiet.
"From now on," Tav said.
"From now on," Alistair agreed.
They looked at each other across the kitchen island — the two of them, the one thing between them that was genuinely theirs.
"Tea?" Alistair said.
"Yes," Tav said.
• • •
CHAPTER EIGHT
The architecture building at 11:43 p.m. was a different place from what it was at noon.
In daylight it was marble and glass and institutional busyness — students with portfolios, faculty discussions, the ambient hum of legitimate academic life. At night it hollowed out into something else: echoing corridors and motion-sensor lighting that clicked on late and died quickly, the architecture stripped of its social furniture down to bone and shadow.
Tav moved through it without triggering a single light.
He had memorized the building's layout from the publicly available campus plans, cross referenced against the facilities schedule he'd obtained in his second week on campus, and mapped the security rotation with three days of patient observation from the coffee stall near the eastern entrance. The maintenance blind spot on the third floor occurred between 11:40 and 11:44 every Thursday. Four minutes was sufficient.
Dean Laurent Voss moved ahead of him along the second-floor corridor, unhurried, carrying his leather satchel beneath one arm. No visible security personnel. No escort. A man who had spent long enough operating with impunity that he'd stopped calculating for contingencies. That alone was a detail worth noting.
Tav followed at a distance calibrated to keep him outside peripheral vision, matching Voss's pace with the non-sound of someone who had practiced it for years. He checked his watchwithout breaking stride: the window was good. The route to Voss's office was clear. The preparation had been thorough.
Something still felt wrong.
He'd been noticing the feeling intermittently for the better part of two weeks, and he'd attributed it to the complication of Alistair's presence and what that presence had introduced into what should have been a straightforward assignment. The wrongness wasn't about the assignment itself. It was about variables he hadn't accounted for — variables that had the same amber-eyed, silver-ringed quality that Tav was having increasing difficulty treating as operationally neutral.
He put it aside and focused.
The maintenance staircase. Third floor. The security blind spot was currently active. He took the stairs in silence, turned the corner—
